On the covering relation in the interpretability lattice of equational theories (Q690111): Difference between revisions

One can consider this paper as a continuation of the paper reviewed above. For a better understanding you should read first the paper just referred to. The author proves that neither the equational theories of bounded distributive lattices nor the equational theories of abelian groups have covers. He mentions that the same results hold for distributive lattices which are bounded from below or which are bounded from above. As a counterpoint he shows that the equational theory of the Boolean algebras does have a cover. It is not nice to blurt out the secret, but one cannot resist the temptation. Actually, he adds to the language \(L= \{+, \cdot,\;', 0, 1\}\) of Boolean algebras two new unary operations \(h_ 1\) and \(h_ 2\), satisfying the equations \(1\approx h_ 1(1)+ h_ 2(1)\) and \(h_ 1(h_ 1(1))\approx h_ 2(h_ 2 (1)) \approx 0\). He observes that this language has no interpretation in the original theory, as it has no two-element model. (It is easy to see that this theory has a four-element model.) He remarks that Jennifer Hyndman extended this result to any finite primal algebra. The author conjectures that no other theory with two-element model has a cover.